Sometimes it seems Google’s only constant is change. Now, we’re at the beginning of a whole new chapter in Google’s search results and experience. Check it out:
At this moment, Google’s search results are undergoing serious transformations. The new format, called “Search Plus Your World” is currently rolling out. Basically, it means Google will find both content that’s been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a single set of listings. You will only see this personalized view if you’re signed-in to Google.com and searching in English.
The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search 2 times using two different systems.
However, Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy concerns, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (which it is not, but it seems like that). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended. It’s likely that the new format and features will cause Google to come under renewed fire for leveraging its search engine to favour its own content and crowd out competitors. Let’s have a more detailed look at this.
Before: Separate Personalized & Social Search Results
Google has had personalized results since June 2005. These are results from across the web that are given a ranking boost because they are deemed especially of interest to someone, based on their personal behaviour and interests. Without the boost, these results might not have made it into the top listings for a particular search. Personalized results were expanded and presented in a new way in February 2007. Then, in December 2009, you no longer had to opt-in to receive personalized results. They were enabled by default for everyone, to some degree, even if you weren’t signed-in to Google. Separately, Google has had social search results since October 2009. These are also personalized listings but ones based on the people you know, rather than your personal behaviour. They’ve also been given a ranking boost. Initially segregated from “regular” listings, Google’s social search results were blended into regular results in Feburary 2011 and expanded to include not just content created by those you know but also content shared by them through a variety of social networks.
Now: Personal, Private, Public & Social United
With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. This view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behaviour and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears. Google created a toggle for this new format that allows you to switch between personalized and unpersonalized results:
Private Content In Your Search Results Pages
To summarize, personalized results include:
- Listings from the web
- Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behaviour
- Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
- Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)
- Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you
The last line states actually the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web.
No Content From Facebook Or Other Social Networks
For many people it will probably be very useful to do just 1 search to locate both private and public information at once. However, one of the biggest depositories of private information these days — if not the biggest — is Facebook. Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+” .
Why are these others missing? “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal said. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
Perhaps Search Plus Your World will prove the carrot or stick that Google’s been after for years to get Facebook to share its data with Google. If the new feature takes off, searchers may wonder why they can’t find privately shared information from their Facebook friends easily on Google.
Then again, Facebook could decide to push back by improving its own search features. Currently, Facebook has partnered with Bing, allowing Bing to personalize its search results for searchers based on what their Facebook friends like. However, only publicly shared content gets personalized like this. Potentially, Facebook and Bing could work more closely together to come up with their own version of Search Plus Your World. That could happen on Bing, or it could happen within Facebook itself.
To date, Facebook’s not spent much time trying to refine its own search results. The main reason seems to be that the company has repeatedly said that most of the Facebook-based searches it sees are to find people, not to find information about broad topics as happens on Google.
Only You & Those You Share With Will See Private Content
The new format might feel strange to people in the beginning, as you’ll see “private” content appearing in what seems like Google’s “public” search results. Of course, personalized results aren’t Google’s public results. They are results personalized just for the person viewing them. If private content has been shared with those people, that’s visible. If it hasn’t been, then it’s not.
Google’s also not making it possible to search for anything that you couldn’t already search for before. As I explained, private content shared on Google+ could be found with a Google+ search. Google’s really just making Google+ Search one of its Universal Search sources, in some ways. In other words, you can search on Google and find matches from Google News, Google Images, Google Video and other Google search services without having to go to them individually. Google+ Search is now another one of those integrated services.
Will It Lead To Concerns?
As said, the ability to search for private content on Google+ isn’t new. However, we wonder if having it integrated into Google’s search results itself might cause some surprises and issues for both Google and its users.
Consider sites selling counterfeit goods. When Google links to these, it gets blamed for promoting counterfeiting, almost as if it created the sites. What’s really happening is that Google comes under fire for giving sites visibility. Now Google’s going to give greater visibility to private information.
Things that people may have forgotten sharing with others will begin to show up through ordinary Google searches. Some might not like this, if material they’ve happily forgotten suddenly seems to reappear. Google might take the blame, even though the sharing was done by others.
It might be similar to some of the concerns that came up recently with Facebook Timeline. It’s not that the material Timeline lists wasn’t out there before. But by organizing it, forgotten things are brought back up.
Another issue is that it’s very easy with Google+ (as it is with Facebook and Twitter) for someone with access to private content to reshare it publicly. Someone searching on Google, then coming across an unexpected photo or post from a friend, might reshare it to the world. All this could happen without the search integration. Maybe none of it will be much of an issue at all. But these are concerns that come to mind.
One solution might be an option to exclude your shared content from being searchable. This is something that can be done with public content on the web. You can tell Google or other search engines not to include published material in their search listings. Perhaps Google needs to offer the same for private content, as well (it doesn’t currently).
Secure Search Protects Privacy; Referrers For Advertisers Does Not
Google has been focused on a bigger concern. Mixing private content in with its search results means that anyone searching without a secure connection potentially exposes that private content to eavesdropping. And now the full story about why Google rolled out secure search for signed-in users back in October can finally be told. It was necessary preparation to allow for Search Plus Your World to happen today.
The encryption that secure search provides means that any private material mixed in with your regular results is protected, seen only by your browser and Google, not by anyone somehow monitoring an internet connection that you’re using.
Many publishers were upset about the encryption move last year because, as part of that, Google also stopped providing referrer data, information that shows what searches someone did on Google before visiting a web site.
Expect Google to point to today’s move as a further reason to justify the dropping of referrers. However, the move might make things even worse, in terms of privacy, since referrer data is still being passed to advertisers. Potentially, people are going to search for even more private things than they ever did before. Potentially, they’re going to click on ad links and pass these private search terms to advertisers.
Opt-Out, Not Opt-In
Don’t like the idea of personalized search? Unfortunately, Google didn’t go the opt-in route. Instead, you have to deliberately opt-out. You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle. Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results. This is nice. It’s the first time since December 2009 that people have been able to easily see “normal” results, if they want them.
Personalized Is The New “Normal”
Of course, it’s a mistake to assume that doing this really shows normal results. It will eliminate personalization factors such as your web browsing history (if you provide that to Google through its toolbar in Internet Explorer), your searching history or your social connections. But geographic targeting — which have have a big influence – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.
More importantly, with Google heading toward 100 million users on Google+, if a good number of those are active users, then they’re logged in to Google. That means the “normal” results they see are personalized. Personalized results are normal; non-personalized are not.
Google Profiles Get Big Push
Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search. For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box. This is very similar to how Google Direct Connect works for Google+ Business Pages. The results individuals see are biased toward people in their own social networks, similar to how Facebook works when you search for people there. In other words, if you searched for a friend who had a common name, you should be shown your actual friend’s Google+ profile, rather than someone you don’t know. In addition, the search results themselves will devote much more room to displaying material from a Google+ person (and actually have been doing so since November):
What About Promoting Facebook Profiles Or Even Web Sites?
Still, it’s a lot of room devoted to Google+ profiles. While Facebook’s terms have prevented Google from getting some data, there should not be any particular reason why the type of direct connect suggestion being shown above — as well as the deep display of content from a Facebook profile page — couldn’t also be done for Facebook, not to mention Twitter. After all, if Google can do expanded sitelinks for social media profiles like at Quora or Twitter, then expanded profile listings showing some relevant posts from those profiles doesn’t seem that difficult.
People & Pages Suggestions
There’s another change coming up: suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow. These will appear on the right-hand side of search results, when Google decides they are relevant. That’s nice promotion for Google+. But there are still many more people on Twitter and Facebook versus Google+. Google should be able to easily figure out what profiles on other social networks might be relevant to searches. That’s Google’s job as a search engine, if it’s going to make these type of recommendations. But now only Google+ gets this type of treatment, and it doesn’t feel quite right.
Conclusion
Overall, we like the integration that allows for searching through private and public material. As mentioned, many people will probably find it useful. However, we believe there are some additional privacy controls that could be added, in particular, the ability for people to opt their content out of being found through search, if they want. But really, more than anything, we’d like to see Google work to see how it can level the playing field and include the other social networks. Yes, there are things that Facebook or Twitter might not allow, not without Google cutting deals or agreeing to terms it may not want to. But there are also above-and-beyond things that Google probably could do to promote these other services in the way it’s doing for Google Plus. Exciting to see what the near future will bring!
Want to know more? Watch this video about Google’s Search Plus Your World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9TTBxarbs&feature=player_embedded
Article based on: http://searchengineland.com/googles-results-get-more-personal-with-search-plus-your-world-107285
